Philip Wharton, 1st Duke of Wharton
When he was 19 years old, in 1718, he was created Duke of Wharton in the Peerage of Great Britain by King George I, part of an effort to solidify his support in the British House of Lords.
According to author Lewis Melville:[1] [The Duchess], whether irked by the dulness of the country, or desirous to be with her husband, or, what is still more probable, thinking by her presence to guard him against those temptations to which he was all too prone to yield, followed him to London.
The Duke, terribly enraged, vowed he would never see or speak again to her who was responsible for the death of his heir.Though they remained married, he never lived again with his wife (who died in 1726) and "followed his natural leanings and plunged into excesses of all kinds".
Wharton is credited with founding the original Hellfire Club,[2] made up of high-society rakes celebrating debauchery, and primarily performed parodies of religious rites, "which damned him in the eyes of all sober-minded persons.
He was in favour of the Pretender not for religious or nationalist reasons but, he explained, because he was a true Old Whig like his father, whose principles had been betrayed by Walpole and the new non-native royals.
He accepted or sought the position as Jacobite ambassador to the Holy Roman Empire in Vienna in 1725, but the Austrians did not like Wharton, whom they did not consider a satisfactory diplomat.
Wharton's wife died in 1726, and he married Maria Theresa O'Neill O'Beirne, a Maid of Honour to the Queen, only three months later.
He also wrote, that year, a powerful piece against the "corruption" of Whig causes under Walpole entitled, "Reasons for Leaving his Native Country".
Alexander Pope referred to Wharton as "the scorn and wonder of our days" – a man "Too rash for thought, for action too refined" (Epistle to Sir Richard Temple).
He sold his title back to George I and took a position as a lieutenant colonel in the Jacobite forces in the Spanish army fighting England.
In advanced stages of alcoholism, he and his wife moved to the Royal Cistercian Abbey of Poblet, in Catalonia, where he died on 1 June 1731.
In 1738 his valuable mining interests centred on Fremington in Yorkshire were sold, having many years earlier been placed in trust, with the mines of lead, iron and copper reserved for the use of his two sisters, Lady Jane Wharton (1707–1761) (wife of Robert Coke of Longford in Derbyshire, brother of Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester[4]) and Lady Lucy Wharton (d.1739) (wife of Sir William Morice, Baronet, of Werrington in Devon).
Lady Jane survived her sister and on her death in 1760 bequeathed the mines in trust to a certain "Miss Anna Maria Draycott"[5] (c.1736–1787), who was referred to as her "niece", possibly a sobriquet,[6] "whom she had brought up" (i.e. from childhood), according to Clarkson (1814).
Her gratitude to Lady Jane her benefactor is recorded on an inscribed monument she erected to her in St Mary's Church, Sunbury, where she was buried, but with no stated indication of the relationship.
